The View from Lazy Point
A Natural Year in an Unnatural World
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4.9 • 12 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An exhilarating journey of natural renewal through a year with MacArthur fellow Carl Safina
Beginning in his kayak in his home waters of eastern Long Island, Carl Safina's The View from Lazy Point takes us through the four seasons to the four points of the compass, from the high Arctic south to Antarctica, across the warm belly of the tropics from the Caribbean to the west Pacific, then home again. We meet Eskimos whose way of life is melting away, explore a secret global seed vault hidden above the Arctic Circle, investigate dilemmas facing foraging bears and breeding penguins, and sail to formerly devastated reefs that are resurrecting as fish graze the corals algae-free.
"Each time science tightens a coil in the slack of our understanding," Safina writes, "it elaborates its fundamental discovery: connection."
He shows how problems of the environment drive very real matters of human justice, well-being, and our prospects for peace.
In Safina's hands, nature's continuous renewal points toward our future. His lively stories grant new insights into how our world is changing, and what our response ought to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The environment s glass is half-full for lyrical conservationist Safina (Song for the Blue Ocean) even though coral reefs are suffocating under seaweed as parrotfish, which normally consume it, are netted to near extinction; penguins are finding less food to forage for as the Antarctic Ocean s winter sea ice melts earlier and freezes later, reducing the krill they can feed on; and migrating shorebirds are starving because horseshoe crabs have been overhunted and there aren t enough eggs to fuel the birds annual 20,000-mile roundtrip. These are a few of many cause-and-effect calamities addressed in Safina s compassionate account of both a year of four seasons around his eastern Long Island beachfront home, and his travels that same year to the Arctic, the Antarctic, the Caribbean, and the islands of the Pacific. He leavens the gloom, however, with this perception: I m continually struck by how much beauty and vitality the world still holds an optimism that suffuses this sensible and sensitive book. Safina reserves his real anger for capitalists, whose predatory practices, he writes at some length, continually privatize profits and socialize costs, brazenly fouling the environment.
Customer Reviews
Superb
A great writer, and scientist. If you have any connection with the natural world, read this book.